Do We Take Pleasure, or Do We Scoop It Up?

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Bill Morris of San Diego has sent me a lengthy e-mail whose main points I will try to summarize. They concern the Yiddish expression shepn nakhes, to derive pleasure or satisfaction from something, an expression used by many American Jews in its English form of “to shep nakhes.” “She’s shepping nakhes from her son at Harvard Law School,” “They’re looking forward to having grandchildren to shep nakhes from”—who of us hasn’t said or heard such things? Mr. Morris, who has done both, has a confession to make and a question to ask.

The confession is that, until recently, he had thought that nakhes referred only to pleasure derived from one’s offspring. It took a fellow member of his synagogue, he writes, to inform him that nakhes can come from anything. One can get it from a job, a book one has read, or a compliment one has received. True, another common Yiddish expression, nakhes fun kinder, means “nakhes from children,” but this doesn’t exclude other kinds of nakhes. Moreover, the phrase is often invoked ironically to mean its opposite, as in an exchange like: